Camponotus spissinodis Forel 1909

This taxon has been described by Forel as Camponotus lateralis r. spissinodis from Lambessa / Tunisia. Two minor worker syntypes from MHN Genève labeled ‘ C.lateralis Ol. ☿ r. spissinodis Forel type Lambessa’, ‘ANTWEB CASENT09110434 bottom w.’ and 3 major worker syntypes on another pin equally labeled ‘ANTWEB CASENT09110433 bottom w.’ were examined. The investigation showed that C. spissinodis is an African species related to those Eurocaucasian species of the C. lateralis group having a completely blackish dorsum of head. Among other characters, the C. spissinodis types differ from C. piceus, C. heidrunvogtae sp.nov. by the absent or very weak scape base extension (mean SCI 1.25 of four syntypes 1.062) and the clearest differences to C. atricolor is the much larger MGr/CS 1.25 (mean 0.077), the larger SL/CS 1.25 (mean 1.007) and smaller PrL/CS 1.25 (mean 0.397). The relation to C. candiotes appears controversial. There is no single NUMOBAT character which is clearly outside the range of C. candiotes (Tab. 3). Running a PCA of C. atricolor, C. candiotes and the syntypes of C. spissinodis, considering 12 RAVcorrected characters and cephalic size, the C. spissinodis types are placed by the first five principal components within the C. candiotes cluster. NC-part.kmeans and NC-part.hclust allocates the C. spissinodis types to the C. candiotes cluster but they appear with the latter algorithm as single-sample outlier of the C. candiotes cluster. NC-NMDS clustering places the centroid of the type series as outlier in 5 out of 15 bivariate plots of the first six stress vectors. C. spissinodis is not proposed here to be synonymous with C. candiotes because of outlier placements in two exploratory data analyses and differences in two characters clearly confirmed by ANOVA tests: SL/CS 1.25 (F 1,42 =14.23, p<0.001) and PrL/ CS 1.25 (F 1,42 =17.94, p<0.0005). Furthermore, the types of C. spissinodis show a stronger sculpture and more convex profile of dorsal propodeum and absolute size of the largest major worker exceeds the range known for C. candiotes.